Free Radio, Crazy Cops and Broken Windows
The people need victories (and, let's be frank, an occasional shot in the arm, like the welcome tidings of Jorge Mas Canosa's death). A useful victory comes from a federal district court in Oakland. Here, on November 12, Judge Claudia Wilken rejected the request of the Federal Communications Commission that she enjoin Stephen Dunifer from operating his low-watt station, Free Radio Berkeley.
There are several hundred such stations operating across the country, usually with a broadcasting radius of three or four miles, to the great fury of the F.C.C., whose mission is to insure that the right to broadcast is reserved to large corporations. These are profitably carving up the once publicly owned airwaves. Lately the National Association of Broadcasters has been pushing the F.C.C. toward rougher enforcement, with consequences described below.
It was back in 1995 that the F.C.C. first went into Judge Wilken's courtroom to try to shut down Dunifer. At that time the judge found that Dunifer's invocation of First Amendment guarantees had merit. The F.C.C.'s lawyers promptly took the position that Wilken had no jurisdiction to hear his constitutional claims. Now she has told the F.C.C. to make a substantive argument against Dunifer's invocation of First Amendment rights. If she rules in his favor and says the case should proceed to trial, the F.C.C. will most likely appeal to the Ninth Circuit--anything to stay clear of Wilken's courtroom--which would mean another two years before a ruling.
Chafing at the law's obstruction of its aims in California, the F.C.C. surveyed the national scene and elected to make Tampa, Florida, the next battlefield. At 6 a.m. on November 19, one week after Wilken's decision, a gang of some twenty armed men, known officially as a Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force, broke down the front door of Doug Brewer, who has been operating the Party Pirate (102.1 FM) for the past three years in Temple Terrace, part of Greater Tampa. The intrepid force confronting Brewer, his wife and their cat was composed of F.C.C. agents, federal marshals, a SWAT team, customs agents, local police and a man who, perhaps frivolously, described himself as a member of the C.I.A. The local police, friendly with Brewer, who uses the station to help in local crime watches, were apparently embarrassed by the raid. After crashing through the door, the goon squad menaced the Brewers with weapons, screamed at them to lie down and handcuffed them face-down on the floor with gun muzzles to their ears.
For the next twelve hours the task force cordoned off the Brewers' home, ransacked the place and stripped it of anything even vaguely related to broadcasting. Brewer was not shown the search warrant until two hours into the raid. Meanwhile, a crane was brought in to dismantle the small broadcasting tower, damaging the Brewers' home in the process. In the course of its rampages the task force, nourished on a weekly diet of America's Most Wanted, leveled their guns at the cat, threatening to blow it away for jumping up on the kitchen counter and thus displaying insufficient respect. (Police conducting such raids often shoot pets without compunction, claiming that Towser or Fluffy constituted a clear and present danger and had to be dispatched.)
Through the Original Zippo News Service, Brewer issued a statement on November 22: "I am back.... Myself and my wife are just happy to be alive at this moment, as we really thought we may have been killed on the morning of the raid. The agents suggested they would be glad to 'kill us' for our purported federal crime."
The Brewer raid was part of a larger F.C.C. onslaught on micro-radio stations around the country. But one reason behind it may have been that a local commercial operator was angered to find Brewer's station showing up well on local audience ratings.
The Brewers are lucky to be alive. It doesn't take much--an incautious movement, an extra-jumpy cop--for menace to turn to massacre, as the Branch Davidians found out. It's part of an overall repressive climate, in which the cops reckon with good reason that they can tear up the Bill of Rights with impunity.
Think of it in terms of the "broken windows" theory of crime. This is the notion that a supposed "culture of crime" starts with minor infractions--graffiti, turnstile jumping in the subway, vigorous panhandling--which lower the social tone and encourage the perpetrators to advance to more violent activities: muggings, burglaries and so forth. Ergo, prosecute turnstile jumpers vigorously, hound beggars, give graffiti artists a hard time and in many and diverse ways harass and terrorize the poor, thus fixing the "window."
Apply this paradigm to the police. Maybe it starts with cops faking a reason to stop and search a car. Next we have them beating the suspect in the precinct and telling a novice cop to write up the report, describing how the suspect "became violent and had to be subdued." Thus the novice is integrated into the overall lawless police culture and is soon lying his head off in court. Keep this up, amid manifestations of approval from elected officials, and we get New York cops torturing Abner Louima with a broom handle and sheriff's deputies here in Humboldt County, Northern California, happily filming themselves torturing young women by applying cotton swabs saturated with pepper spray to their eyes.
Eeriest of all is to hear the Humboldt cops defend themselves by saying that the use of pepper spray was not only "cost-effective" but somehow humane. This reminds me of the French military authorities during the Algerian war in the fifties who claimed that clipping car battery terminals to someone's genitals was a decent way to behave. Why, they'd cry, General Massu had even tested it on himself! The sotto voce theme here is that more or less anything that doesn't involve beating the suspect to death with a club is virtuous and should be esteemed by all citizens, many of whom, eyes glazed from watching America's Most Wanted, don't give a toss for the Constitution and think the young women pepper-sprayed in Representative Frank Riggs's office brought it on themselves.
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